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NBA Playoffs: Where Cold-Blooded Happens

Someday, decades hence or maybe just later in June, fans will look back at the NBA conference finals and see a structure to the way things unfolded. But for the moment, with both series underdogs facing home games that could win them series in which they were down two games, we are all adrift in it. The coverage in the news cycle is overstated — each win a tipping point, each loss an indication of a deeper rottenness that softens a team all the way to the core — because that’s the way news cycles work. Every subtle tidal shift is reported like a tsunami, and fans have no choice but to grab their boards and surf. So, for the time being, let’s keep it simple. The Boston Celtics won their third straight game against the Miami Heat on Tuesday and will play at home with a chance to win Thursday. The Oklahoma City Thunder have managed the same trick against the San Antonio Spurs and could punch their ticket to the NBA Finals on Wednesday night in Oklahoma City. This wasn’t supposed to happen, and until quite recently, it did not look likely to happen. And yet here it is, happening.

Tuesday’s effort was that convincing, but it was just three games ago that things looked similarly inevitable in the other direction and when the scornful pre-obituaries and dire time-to-wake-up analyses contained different names and carried a Boston accent. The same applies in the Western Conference, where the once-inevitable Spurs and their vanished 20-game winning streak find themselves on the edge of elimination. As with the suddenly seized-up Heat, there’s an explanation for San Antonio’s trouble: They stopped playing their usual elegant, free-flowing basketball, and Oklahoma City started doing it. The result has involved some brilliant, beautiful basketball, but also seems to be cruising toward an unexpected outcome.

“The Thunder aren’t the Spurs,” SB Nation’s Andrew Sharp writes. “They may be every bit as unstoppable, but they’re nowhere near as precise and that’s part of the charm. Every Thunder game is a new adventure with different heroes doing ridiculous things, and we’re along for the ride.” Surf’s up, in other words.

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On Wednesday night, the Los Angeles Kings will take their home ice in an attempt to seize the opportunity to sweep the New Jersey Devils in the Stanley Cup Finals. Given how brilliantly the Kings played during their 15-2 run through the playoffs, this isn’t so much surprising as it is startling: The Kings are clearly good, but this good? The answer, and we’ll refer you once again to that 15-2 postseason record, appears to be yes. Enough so, at least, that the Los Angeles Times is already catching its readership up on the various uses for the Stanley Cup.

By the basic playoff hockey accounting of Hot Goalie > Anything Else, the Kings success is easy to explain. Impermeable, unimpeachable Kings goaltender Jonathan Quick has carried his team by keeping it simple and not making mistakes. There’s more to it than that, though. If the Kings finish their sweep Wednesday, they’ll equal the best postseason record since the NHL adopted its four-round, best-of-seven series format.

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Wade Davis never played in a regular-season NFL game and spent most of his NFL career hanging around the margins of the game — on practice squads, in NFL Europe, in three NFL training camps. But while the former Weber State star didn’t make a lasting impression on the game he loves, Davis has found a way to make an impact off the field. Davis, now 34 and living as an out gay man, has found himself as an activist, mentor and staff member at the Hetrick-Martin Institute, an organization that serves LGBTQ youth. It wasn’t the career Davis had planned, but he has embraced it wholeheartedly. “How many people get to live out their two dreams?” Davis told Amy K. Nelson of SB Nation and Outsports. “I got to play in the NFL, and now I get to change the world.”

“Twelve years ago, he was a closeted rookie in the NFL focusing exclusively on his own struggle to make the Titans roster,” Nelson writes. “Today he focuses the same energy and applies it quite differently.”

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